London, five and a half years later...

Joy here...Tomorrow, on Thursday, February17th we will be hopping a flight to London England.  While I'm nervous about how a week in London will affect my running and training, I'm more nervous about what my response to London itself will be.

You see London and I have a storied history.  I first visited London in 1997 and fell a little bit in love, with many trips and visits thereafter (in 1998, 2003, 2004, and 2005), I felt that we were well on our way to a long and fruitful relationship.

But then in July of 2005 I narrowly missed being caught up in the subway bombings.  Strangely enough that day of all days, my then-boyfriend and I got up a few minutes early deciding on getting a coffee at our destination rather than taking the few extra minutes of sleep.  And so we, unlike so many others, were just fine when the explosions began.  (I have reproduced his published account of the day below for you).  I spent the day wandering and writing in my journal about my experiences and the events unfolding around me.  I have not written about it elsewhere (well aside from an email sent to family and friends to reassure them that we emerged from the underground five minutes before the blasts), but I have never read my journal entries from that July 7th.  Maybe one day I will.

Somehow I feel that it's a little bit inauthentic for me to write about or even think about my day that day, when, in comparison, I have nothing to tell.  There were so many people killed and injured; so many people whose loved ones never made it home that day; and so my own experience pales in comparison.  I think a lot about this dynamic in my research and my work, the dynamic wherein one party whose victimization or suffering cannot compare to another's much greater victimization ends up being silenced.  As one of my favourite characters in a novel I have written about puts it:  "In my mind, I run through my family's history, searching for something horrible.  Some kind of real oppression or injustice.  Some tragedy. [...] I have nothing to say.  Nothing at all to contribute to the conversation."  Like Colleen in that book, when I think of my July 7th, I too am silenced.

And in that inward turning silence, I will admit that I have a bit of trepidation about this upcoming trip.  Because I refuse to go back to that day in my mind; because I am so wary of feeling like a dramatic hanger-on to someone else's trauma; because I generally don't like unpleasantness; because I want to reclaim my unbridled love for London, without any shadows; because I want to share that version of London with The Man who has never been there; and for so many other reasons, I find myself being a bit nervous about this upcoming trip.  I guess I fear that in being in all the familiar locations, I will have no other choice but to think of that day, and thus to grapple with my complicated feelings about being part of and not part of an event  at the same time.

Then again, Londoners go about their daily business all the time, so who am I to even worry about this?  You see, once again, in comparison to others, I feel as though I should just shut up.  So shut up I will, and see how I feel once I get there.

Here's the story that my ex-boyfriend had published in the national newspaper The Globe & Mail giving his perspective on the event:

When the bombs went off, I just ran

On London's streets, movement became a kind of salvation, a solution to help absorb the horrors around me

Alexander Willis 
October 9, 2007

On July 7, 2005, I narrowly missed being killed in the London subway bombings.

I do not believe in luck, but coincidence surely had a hand in my survival. Oblivious to what was happening - even though I was only five minutes away from the explosions, long enough to get to the surface - I continued on toward work at the British Library.

When I finally realized what was happening, I was unsure of where my girlfriend would be: We had parted after emerging from the London Underground. Without cellphones, we were cut off from each other. I knew she was out in the city on holiday, exposed to possible continuing attacks.

And so I ran.

I dashed from the library, through Bloomsbury, past the horrific scene at Tavistock Square, down Oxford Street, to our flat at Hyde Park. I suspected my girlfriend would not be there, but I was denied the option of immobility. I needed to move, to run, to work through the adrenaline, to sift out the noise by, paradoxically, immersing myself in it.

Others, like me, were running. I often wonder if they, like me, were simply trying to process what was happening.

It is not just in moments of crisis that I am impelled to move. My friends say I am a restless person, with a tendency to pace. It's true: I am incapable of sitting still. When I teach university courses, I often stalk about the front of the classroom, gesticulating and thinking aloud. When a student once asked me, "Don't you get tired?" I almost didn't understand the question. Fatigue seemed immaterial; to keep up with their questions and to stay focused, I needed to move.

When I arrived back at our flat, my girlfriend had not returned. My thoughts turned to the worst possible scenarios: that she was dead, injured or trapped.

Staying put was impossible. Movement - even fruitless movement - was a kind of salvation, a way to combine my need for a solution with a desire to absorb the situation around me.

It is a curious thing, this linkage of brain and feet, of mind and motion. For some, action and movement are means to avoid thinking - those people who use exercise to unwind at the end of a difficult day.

Culture has conditioned us to compartmentalize physical activity: If we do consider how our bodies move, it is to package it away under the category of exercise or fitness. Similarly, we are trained to associate stillness and inactivity with deep thoughts, such as those found in quiet libraries, art galleries, classrooms, and churches. The whole infrastructure of intellectualism is premised on fixity and calm. Certainly, one does not often associate a moving body with a better cerebral understanding of the world.

And yet, on that day in London, I began to appreciate that stereotypical division between people who act in moments of crisis and those who watch. Not to say that acting is always better; indeed, I can't honestly say that I accomplished anything practical by running repeatedly across London. Under the circumstances, as the authorities advised, staying put would have been the safest option.

But as I dodged and weaved throughout the teeming masses of confused Londoners, I felt myself far more connected to an understanding of the events than any armchair pundit. In the midst of chaos, my movement between the varied and tragic scenes not only calmed me, but drove me to understand how I was enmeshed in the lives and fate of others. Movement was my only true means to knowledge that day.

My return to the library saw a buzzing scene of commotion. Emergency workers of every stripe swarmed about from King's Cross to Euston. I envied their activity - they had purpose and focus in the eye of the storm.

I emerged from the devastating events of July 7 with a deeper understanding of what it means to move, to act, to see. Before that day, every time I read a story of someone who leapt into a river to save a drowning child, and claimed, "I'm not brave, I just acted," I would dismiss such remarks as false modesty. I do not believe that any more. There is an essential truth there that we might be too quick to dismiss.

Eventually, my girlfriend turned up safely at our flat. Unfairly, I held her to a hypocritical standard. When she told me that she was safe from the moment we parted, I succumbed to a righteous anger, and demanded to know why she had not returned home immediately.

She protested that at first she did not know of what was going on, and that once she did, she decided she was not at risk. She had continued calmly walking about town, taking photographs, curiously observing the events unfolding around her.

In retrospect, my demands for her return did not account for her own need to comprehend the crisis of that day. She knew I was safe at work, and her non-panicked walk home was no more irrational than my mad dashing. I see now that in her own way, she was doing exactly what I was doing.

Rest assured, however: we purchased cellphones soon thereafter.